January 2006 Entries

Ned Writes:
I was interviewing a woman for a QA position, and asked her why she liked QA. She said, Where else can you get paid to complain?
It's so very true. It also makes me think I should revisit all those people who mentioned that I'm apparently very good at it and stab them with something. But hey!
Technorati tags: Miscellaneous, Web Development

So I've played about with Thunderbird, mostly as a tool to test LDAP queries. But I'd appreciate some feedback either via email, or here from someone who's used it.
1 specific query, and 1 general one:
Have you ever tried copying your mail/data/whatever across to another platform? Ie, gone from Mac to Linux, or Windows to Mac, etc etc?
Any comments / complaints / feedback at all in general?
I'm also interested to know about what address book formats it supports and how exportable they are, as well as testing out it's support for multiple identities/accounts etc, but I'll install it later...

I grabbed myself a new phone on Friday, a Sony Ericcson K750i. It's too early for a full review yet. I'm still getting used to it, and after 6-7 years of using Nokias I'm finding the texting a bit of an adjustment to make, but I'll get used to it. Interestingly enough, one of the main reasons I got this phone was the camera. The K750i comes with a 2 megapixel camera which has a lot of the features of a "regular" camera - it does panoramic shots, burst shots, has varying exposure levels, a night mode, a light, a...

One of the first things I did when I got my phone was to try and get all my contacts synced up. I noticed the Nokia PC Suite had sent all my contacts over to the phone instead of the SIM by default, which was fine. The Sony Ericcson software has always been pretty good about supporting Notes..
...until now it seems. No Notes support. Ugh. Well no matter, I fire up the Sync software and I see it supports various flavours of Outlook, and the Windows Address Book. I've seriously tried to use Outlook a few times, but it never...

New NZ Launch Date for Xbox 360
Auckland, January 27 2006 – Xbox today announced a new launch date in Australia and New Zealand for the Xbox 360™. The new launch date is 12.01am on March 23 2006.
The new launch date has been set due to unprecedented global consumer demand and short-term manufacturing issues due to component shortages stemming from challenges in ramping supply. The move ensures that the markets will have an adequate supply of Xbox 360 consoles to meet demand at launch.
Xbox 360 is well on its way to becoming the fastest-selling video game console in history, and...

BBC Creative Research and Development have just released a stellar research report on gamers' habits in the UK -- how people from six to 65 play, what they play, why they play, and how they got to playing. It's a real eye-opener -- and chock full of stats-candy in sweet charts.
BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65 (1.2mb PDF)Technorati tags: Gaming

The Smallest fish in the world has apparently been just discovered. The scientist talking about it here is hoping we get a chance to discover it before it's habitat dies out:
The tiny, see-through Paedocypris fish have the appearance of larvae and have a reduced head skeleton, which leaves the brain unprotected by bone.
They live in dark tea-coloured waters with an acidity of pH3, which is at least 100 times more acidic than rainwater.
'This is one of the strangest fish that I've seen in my whole career', said Ralf Britz, zoologist at the Natural History Museum.
'It's tiny, it...

SearchPluginHacks is a Firefox extension which can help you remove Search options.
It seems kind of weird that this isn't included in Firefox, but it's also strange that the developer of this plugin didn't mention that if you're simply wanting to remove some of the search engines which come installed by default, then you can just delete the .src and the graphic file from your "searchplugins" directory (on Windows, C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins, or whereever you've installed Firefox).
Technorati tags: Firefox, Web Development

Jens of Sweden’s new multimedia player lets you watch your favorite movie as well as sing along to the soundtrack. Under one of the markets thinnest shells (13 mm) you'll find a remarkable width of functions. With MP3 and MP4 player, radio, stereo speakers and a crisp display you will be able to say good bye to all those lonely moments.
Add lyric files and sing karaoke, or let your friends hear the original artist through the built-in speakers. The MP-500 is scratchproof and available with a 1GB or 2GB memory in black or gold.
And you thought it was hard...

Gizmodo talks about rumors that production of the original Xbox will soon be ceased.
So our half-brothers out-of-wedlock twice-related, Kotaku, received a tip this morning saying that today the Xbox manufacturing would be stopped—most likely to pave way for the 360. The tip mentioned that Microsoft had no intention to keep the Xbox v1.0 any longer and would turn it into a bargain bin console.
The Kotaku sleuths contacted Microsoft to further inquire about this rumor in which Microsoft responded by dodging the questions. They said the Xbox v1.0 plans remained unchanged to sell units into 2006, but they ended the...

Ed Brill writes about Migration to Microsoft: Look before you leap. The entry is basically talking about thinking carefully before making a commitment to starting on a Domino -> Microsoft migration. If you're in the situation where you're considering this, then you should definately read his post and read all the links.
You'd expect a bit of bias from Ed, however my personal situation backs Ed's stance up very well. After 9 years of working with Notes/Domino, I'm shifting my career to ASP.NET. I'm surrounded by custom Domino databases - ones I've written myself for my own "life management", and ones...

Lots of stuff coming out of Lotusphere at the moment, most importantly new annoucements and screenshots. I was going to make this a longish entry, but there's a lot of people writing live from the event, so it's probably easier to just post summaries of links along with some short comments.
RSS feeds and blog templates coming in Domino
They're a little overdue, but it seems we have RSS feeds and blog templates as standard in Domino. The unofficial "IBM Lotus Blogging Community" has been working on their own solutions to this for quite some time now, but it's nice that it's...

Posted today on www.edbrill.com:
There's more to the Sametime 7.5 news than what has been written so far
There's more to the Mac news than what has been written so far
"Hannover", according to those who had a sneak peek today, is a "wow"
Workplace Forms, as was commented here and on other blogs today, is a "wow"
From the bottom up:
Workplace forms? Could be interesting, however I'm not sure how many Workplace deployments have been done in NZ. I can only count the number of deployments among my customers (0), or the number of enquiries I've had about the product (0).
Hannover...

Guild Wars: Factions first impressions.
Here are my random notes after playing about with Guild Wars: Factions over the weekend. I didn't end up playing for long, as I found out what I needed to know pretty quickly.
The ritualist is not at all what I was expecting. The Spirits sounded like pets, but they function more like "Wells", ie, Necromancers well of blood and the like. They don't move, and simply stay there and affect the entire party. Yes, this is just like the Ranger spirits you might say - but I hadn't seen a lot of those due to...

While updating the banner image I just checked the database for the oldest document. It seems I started this database in late 2000 (September roughly), and have been going ever since. In fact it's been the same database that I originally created, which has simply mutated and changed over the past 5 or so years.Technorati tags: Merauderweb

A few very quick screenies of Guild Wars: Factions up here on FlickR. A bit more writing to come in a day or two, when I get time to write up my notes (as brief as they are).
Technorati tags: Gaming, MMORPG, Guild Wars

A few changes about the site over the next couple of weeks, or for however long it takes. Most of it is pretty subtle and behind the scenes, but should be followed by a visual rework afterwards.
- Added the site to Technorati
- Added Technorati tags to posts
- Fixed the searching, which has never been too slick.
- Fixed a couple of CSS glitches which have been annoying me for a while
- Updating the RSS Feed to support categories instead of single subjects
...

Lucasarts continues to churn out Star Wars related games, and hey, if I was them I would too! Anyhow, Star Wars: Empire at War looks like it has definate potential.
Picture that moment in any RTS when you've amassed a large army, and use your uber micro to send it off into battle on 3 fronts - well, wouldn't that be even more fun if the army was a mixture of Stormtroopers, AT-STs, and even AT-ATs? Well, I think it would.
Looks like it's available in NZ from the 9th of Feb.
Technorati tags: Gaming, MMORPG, Star Wars

Struggling telecoms company Woosh Wireless has been thrown a lifeline. It yesterday disclosed several of its high-profile shareholders had agreed to inject another $29.2 million, avoiding a cash crunch.
The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, Wellington's wealthy Todd family, US venture capitalist Clarity, and the Arab investor Kuwait Finance House are subscribing to debt that will convert into equity.
Just over $19.2 million of the cash has been received; $10 million more is due in February. Exact terms of the injection are still to be resolved.
It seems Woosh has just received $29m worth of financial bailing out. This comes shortly...

OGaming - Guild Wars: Factions info. The stuff on the Official Guild Wars homepage isn't too clear about what Factions exactly is. It sounds like a once off event, but it's also adding a lot of things into the game.
Players can visit this new area of the world to to try out a brand new arena, to visit the new combat training zones, or to experience the PvP explorable areas. Join us to get an early look at how PvP will evolve with the coming of Guild Wars: Factions!
I don't know 100% what they mean by this, but "PvP explorable...

Apparently, according to this article on slashdot iPod owners are less likely to download music using filesharing software than owners of other MP3 players.
There are a few reasons they mention for this, but here's another possible one not mentioned: Maybe they're so certain iTunes contains privacy compromising features that they decided it wasn't worth the risk? ;)Technorati tags: Apple, iPod

I'm currently reinstalling my development environment at home, in order to do some work with the 2.0 framework and Visual Studio 2005. Our main project at work right now is targetted for the 1.1 framework, and we're using Visual Studio 2003, pretty much because it would have taken too much trouble to convince the client that 2.0 was worth pursuing, so unfortunately this is the only way to get some active exposure to 2005 other than what I saw at this years Microsoft Connect event.
Anyhow, I have the 2.8gb ISO for SQL Server 2005 here, but decided to skip...

So far Friday the 13th has yielded 2 power cuts in our main data center. No big deal, I guess, except for the fact that the company we use to filter/scan our email happens to be moving their backup/secondary MTA today. Oh, and that company? They share offices with our Infrastructure company, and they lease some space in our data center too. So their primary + secondary MTAs were dead, meaning a lot of mail was flat out rejected instead of being queued (and they don't really know why either).
Given that it's Friday the 13th, I guess we got off...

http://zero-one-zero.com/vs/index.html contains a few plug ins for Visual Studio, both 2003 and 2005. VSFileFinder, VSTabs, and a Keyboard shortcuts chart. I'm mentioning it here so I can find it later.
Tags: ASP.NET, Visual Studio

There are a couple more XUL examples on Codestore, with some sample downloads and online demos. If you happen to be developing something for a Firefox only client there might be some useful code there you could re-use.

XP Won't Run on Intel MacBook, iMac
With the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple's use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than BIOS, current Windows releases will not run on the systems.
Technorati tags: Apple, Windows

While checking out which domain names are available for the Auckland Blues (Super 14 Rugby Team), I wander across http://www.blues.com/, which happens to redirect to Ray Ozzie's weblog. Small world. The concept of having all people connected via 6 degrees of separation is one I find quite interesting, however it seems it might be just as applicable to pastimes and recreational activities.
(As a sidenote, I was checking for Auckland Blues sites because their official one is so crap. Super 14 franchises really need to sort themselves out with regards to their sites, as apart from the Crusaders site they all...

While wearing any of my current "hats" as a Domino Developer, an ASP.NET developer, or a system architect for a development house, I don't have a lot of exposure to Apple hardware (my iPods notwithstanding). However I'm always looking for ways I could make use of one. For a few reasons - it'd be nice to know first hand the pros and cons of each system through firsthand experience, rather than evangalistical arguments of "x is better than y because of z" which seem to be so annoyingly commonplace at the moment.
So anyway, with the announcement of some new...

Take a treadmill, a set of handlebars, a USB cable, and hook it up to Quake 4 - what have you got? Gamerunner, the way to combine fitness with gaming. It had to happen sooner or later.
Technorati tags: Gaming

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Confidentiality Obligations have been lifted:
Turbine is pleased to announce that the confidentiality obligations in the Preview and Non-disclosure Agreement for the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ONLINE™: Stormreach™ Beta have been lifted earlier than anticipated. This means players in the Beta Program and those who took part in the Stress Test Events are free to talk about the game on public forums. After getting so much positive feedback from our Beta players, we felt it was time to let them share their opinions and praise for DDO with the rest of the MMOG community.
So what? Well, it...

Guild Wars has been named Best MMORPG of the Year and is one of the Top 10 PC Games of the Year, according to Gamespy. Guild Wars also received an award for Best Value. Find the full awards listing here.
Best MMORPG is a big call - I'd agree with Best Value, and that it should probably have some place in the Top 10 games listing, but Guild Wars isn't really a MMORPG as such - it's a multiplayer game with a shared graphical foyer/chat room (well, assuming you classify standing around shouting "FUK U KUNT" and so on as...

When I first saw the Domino XUL demo I hadn't really been exposed to XUL at all, so I had to look it up on Wikipedia.
XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Like UIML, it is an application of XML that describes user interfaces. The acronym is pronounced zool, to rhyme with "cool"
The sample app over at Codestore looks rather cool, and I can think of a number of times when I'd have needed to use similar functionality in the past. The downside is...

There was a bit of discussion recently in various Lotus blogs about the fact that the domain Lotusphere.com simply redirected to the IBM homepage, instead of to the actual page for the event.
Some people didn't see the big deal, some people thought it was a pretty poor show from IBM (which I tend to agree with).
So now it appears that LotuSphere.com correctly redirects to the homepage - what was the big deal? I mean http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/events/govfor.nsf/wdocs/ls2006home is a pretty easy URL to remember, right?Technorati tags: Lotus, Notes, Domino

Microsoft Team RSS Blog, Icons: It’s still orange.
I love the guy in the comments pleading with them to reconsider, because the icon conjures up images of 'wireless' for him.
(it's just an icon, really)Technorati tags: RSS

How to fix your monitor if some idiot puts a magnet on it (woil.ws) - an interesting read, the comments are even more amusing despite the fact that most of them are fakes. My Sony 24" has suffered from a green patch down the bottom of it for quite some time, so when I get back to work I need to decide if I want to try waving some magnets next to it.. hmm..
[EDIT]: Found a bit of complimentary info on Wikipedia about Degaussing.

There's some talking going on about a new WMF exploit, and how it can affect Notes. Full info on the explot can be found in Microsoft Security Advisory (912840), as well as in US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#181038.
Ed Brill has a collection of links relating to how it affects Notes users which should provide the info you need if you're concerned.